Articles and eBooks

This E-book presents a practical approach to modeling Service-Oriented Architecture solutions from concept to code. The author helps us to understand key SOA concepts and demystifies the "acronym soup" surrounding service-oriented development. Using an illustrated example, the reader is guided through the 'hands-on' ICONIX Process Roadmap for Service-Oriented Architecture. Each step of the roadmap is brought to life using Enterprise Architect Business and Software Engineering edition to derive concrete deliverables from visual models.

In this e-book, author Doug Rosenberg introduces a new roadmap for embedded systems development - ICONIX Process for Embedded Systems. Each step of the process is clearly explained, drawing upon the Audio Player model constructed in the Systems Engineering edition of Enterprise Architect.

Topics covered in the e-book include SysML modeling concepts such as requirements, block definition, system behaviour, parametrics, state charts and software implementation, as well as advanced capabilities of Enterprise Architect's Systems Engineering edition.

Download the E-book, Roadmap, Project Template and Audio Player example as a zip file

Presents experiences and lessons-learned from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project. The sheer size and complex nature of LSST, bring a unique set of challenges and a massive software modeling endeavor. However, the unchanging principles behind use of model abstractions, UML and the ICONIX process remain beneficial in such an undertaking, as highlighted throughout this account.

In this article, Doug extends the concept of Design Driven Testing for hardware/software systems, allowing
SysML-based designs to be tested in a highly rigorous, systematic way. It's still Design Driven
Testing, but now the design elements that need to be tested include all of the "four pillars of
SysML", whereas DDT for software focuses on testing behavior.

In 2008, based on our experience with a number of business process engineering projects over the last few years, we developed the ICONIX Business Modeling Roadmap ; a step-by-step "cookbook" for Business Analysts (BAs) which details our simplified approach to business modeling. Our roadmap is premised on the idea that BAs want to focus on modeling a business and not on elaborate business modeling notations.

The basic concept of “thread generation” from use cases is quite simple. I’ll illustrate it with an example later in this article, but here’s a quick summary. Use cases generally have a “sunny day scenario” (the typical sequence of user actions and system responses), and several “rainy day scenarios” (everything else that can happen, like errors, exceptions, and less typical usage paths). When you’re modeling systems with use cases, you make an upfront investment in “writing the user manual” one scenario at a time, with the expectation of recovering your investment later on in the project.

Trying to make sense out of the “acronym-scrabble” that engulfs Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is a major challenge. We’re going to take a shot at it in this article by defining a process roadmap and following a single example all the way from architecture to code. Along the way we’ll illustrate many of the key features of Enterprise Architect Business and Software Engineering Edition.

At ICONIX, we’ve had pretty good success when we defined an unambiguous development process, and presented that development process in “roadmap” form. We’ve developed process roadmapsfor use case driven software development, business modeling, design-driven testing, and algorithm-intensive software design. In this article we’re going to do it again, this time using SysML to describe embedded systems that involve a combination of hardware and software.

ICONIX and Sparx Systems have collaborated on the production
of a new Add-In that extends the functionality of Enterprise Architect to
support Design-Driven Testing (DDT).DDT
(also known as ICONIX Process for Test)
will be described more completely in an upcoming book by Doug Rosenberg and
Matt Stephens.This article describes
how to use the Agile/ICONIX add-in to drive test code from UML models.

Version 2 of the ICONIX Roadmap incorporates two new advances in technology that have recently been developed, which enable for the first time the generation of algorithmic code for business rules, starting from a natural language description of the business scenario. These advances are the Business Rule Composer from Sparx Systems, in combination with the natural language capabilities of Raven.

Geographic information is the key enabler whether it be managing national
security, the assets of a local Government, resource management or locating a
restaurant of choice. Since 1969 Environmental Systems Research Institute
(ESRI) a software development and services company has been providing
Geographic Information System (GIS) software and geodatabase management
applications. ESRI uses the name ArcGIS

The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is a governmental agency in
the Executive Branch of Virginia state government. DMV administers motor
vehicle and tax related laws for the continued benefit of all citizens of the
Commonwealth of Virginia. These include titling and licensing, transportation
safety, and other motor vehicle-related laws and regulations...

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a proposed ground-based 8.4-
meter, 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint
astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night.

In a relentless campaign of 15 second exposures, LSST will cover the available
sky every three nights, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or
move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-
Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The superb images from the
LSST will also be used to trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the
distortions in their shapes produced by lumps of Dark Matter, providing multiple
tests of the mysterious Dark Energy.

While ICONIX primarily provides training and consulting to software projects
and organizations, we occasionally are requested to provide guidance to companies
who are modeling business processes. In many cases, these business process
engineering efforts are a precursor to software system design, and there is
a natural desire to maximize commonality between the business modeling process
and the software design process which will subsequently followed, which is often
ICONIX Process.

Based on our experience in helping a number of business process engineering projects
over the last few years, we have developed the ICONIX Business Modeling Roadmap
; a set of activity diagrams which detail our simplified approach to business
modeling and is the subject of this paper. More...

In this, the final part of our series of excerpts from Use
Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: Theory and Practice Matt
Stephens and Doug Rosenberg show
you how to draw lean, purposeful sequence diagrams that are driven from the
use cases and preliminary design. More...

To get from use cases to detailed design (and then to code),
you need to link your use cases to objects. The technique we
describe in this chapter, robustness analysis, helps you to
bridge the gap from analysis to design by doing exactly that.
More...

Java developers using the Eclipse environment can have a "pre-fabricated
development process" delivered to them using the Eclipse Process
Framework (EPF). Until recently, process options available
in this format were mostly limited to a Unified/RUP option,
and an eXtreme Programming (XP) option.

Using the ICONIX Process Roadmap by Doug Rosenberg

Beginning with Version 6.5, Build 801, Enterprise Architect includes a startup option to install an ICONIX Process Roadmap and an ICONIX Skeleton Project upon creating a new project. This white paper explains how to use these capabilities, which facilitate the use of a lightweight, agile, use case driven UML development process

Since the beginning of modeling time, the gap (sometimes a chasm) between models and code has always been problematic. Models, the argument goes, don't represent reality.only the code represents reality.therefore the model must be worthless, and we should just skip modeling and jump straight to code. Those who have used this argument to avoid modeling probably felt quite safe in doing so because nobody has ever managed to make "reverse engineering" or "round-trip engineering" a very seamless process.until now. The innocuously named "MDG Integration" product from Sparx Systems (a companion product to the Enterprise Architect modeling tool) changes the whole equation. You can read the article online or you can download it in Microsoft Word format